Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Rajiv Malhotra is the belated Hindu answer to decades of the
systematic blackening of Hinduism in academe and the media. This is to be distinguished
from the negative attitude to Hinduism among ignorant Westerners settling for
the “caste, cows and curry” stereotype, and from the anti-Hindu bias among
secularists in India. Against the latter phenomenon, Hindu polemicists have
long been up in arms, eventhough they have also been put at a disadvantage by
the monopoly of their enemies in the opinion-making sphere. But for challenging
the American India-watching establishment, a combination of skills was
necessary which Malhotra has only gradually developed and which few others can
equal.

In the present book, Academic
Hinduphobia (Voice of India, Delhi 2016, 426 pp.), he documents some of his
past battles against Hinduphobiain
academe, i.e. the ideological enmity against Hinduism. We leave undecided for
now whether that anti-Hindu attitude stems from fear towards an intrinsically
better competitor (as many Hindus flatter themselves to think), from contempt
for the substandard performance of those Hindus they have met in polemical
forums, or from hatred against phenomena in their own past which they now think
to recognize in Hinduism (“racism = untouchability”, “feudal inborn inequality
= caste”).

In this war, American academe is linked with foreign policy
interests and the Christian missionary apparatus, and they reinforce one
another. Hindus have a formidable enemy in front of them, more wily and
resourceful than they have ever experienced before. That is why a new knowledge
of the specific laws of this particular battlefield is called for.

Demonolization

Rajiv Malhotra correctly lays his finger on the links
between Christian traditions and present-day Leftist techniques to undermine
India. Many Hindus think that Western equals Christian, but this is wrong in
two ways: not all Christians are Western, and not all Westerners are Christian.
Yet, secular and leftist Westerners are nonetheless heirs to Christian
strategies and modes of thinking. Thus, many of the Christian Saints have a
narrative of martyrdom, and usually it is that which made them Saints. The
early Church deliberately spread or concocted martyrdom stories, for it
empirically found these successful in swaying people towards accepting the
Christian message.

Today, this tradition is being continued in secularized
form: “Western human rights activists, and non-Westerners trained and funded by
them, go around the world creating new categories of ‘victims’ that can be used
in divide-and-conquer strategies against other cultures. In India’s case, the
largest funding of this type goes to middlemen who can deliver narratives about
‘abused’ Dalits and native (especially Hindu) women.” (p.219)

Here, Malhotra prepares the ground for his Breaking India thesis, where different
forces unite with a common goal: to deconstruct India’s majority culture and
fragment the country. At the same time, he sketches the psychology of the
Hindu-haters, explaining why they have such a good conscience in lambasting
Hinduism and trying to destroy it. They like to see themselves as the oppressed
underdogs, or in this case as champions of the oppressed, in spite of their
privileged social position and their senior position vis-à-vis the born Hindus
who come to earn PhDs under their guidance.

Among those confronted here are Sarah Caldwell, David Gordon
White, Deepak Sarma, Robert Zydenbos and Shankar Vedantam. Note the names of
some Hindu-born sepoys. The term “sepoy” for Hindus trying to curry favour with
their white superiors needs a be nuanced a little bit. In colonial days, it was
black and white: Britons trying to perpetuate and legitimize their domination,
and Indian underlings trying to prosper as much as possible in the British
system. Today, American Indologists are also partly influenced (esp. in their
furious hatred of Hindutva) by Indian
secularist opinion, but then this has in turn been oriented in an anti-Hindu
sense precisely by the earlier cultural anglicization of the elites during
colonial times. Anyway, in the present context, it is indeed Americans leading
the dance and Indians trying to keep up.

Principally, Malhotra focuses on different episodes in the
one controversy that made him a household name in Indology circles: exposing
Wendy Doniger’s brand of roundabout and candid-sounding anti-Hindu polemic. By
his much-publicized example, he has galvanized many Hindus into actively
mapping the battlefield and even coming out to do battle themselves against the
mighty and intolerant Hindu-watching establishment. There is no longer an
excuse for the all-too-common Hindu attitude of smug laziness hiding behind the
spiritual-sounding explanation that, instead of our own effort, the law of
karma will take care of everything.

The book is a pleasant read, because the described
characters are variegated and the events on the ground are swiftly advancing
all while the ideas are being developed. For understanding the entirety of its
message, I can only advise you to read it, it is really worth your time. Here I
will limit myself to a searchlight on a few passages.

Wendy’s
psycho-analytic free-for-all

One of the faces of academic “Hinduphobia” is the flippant
eroticizing discourse about Hindu civilization developed by Chicago
University’s Prof. Wendy Doniger, continued by her erstwhile Ph.D. students and
eagerly taken over by prominent media like the Washington Post. Here, Malhotra first of all amply documents the
reality and seriousness of the problem. Imagine: a number of professors who are
not at all qualified as psycho-analysts and would be punishable if they applied
their diagnosis to a living human being, feel entitled to psycho-analyse a Guru
like Ramakrishna or a God like Ganesha.

Thus, Jeffrey Kripal’s thesis about Ramakrishna (Kali’s Child) is, according to a quoted
Bengali critic, marred by “faulty translations”, “wilful distortion and
manipulation of sources”, “remarkable ignorance of Bengali culture”,
“misrepresentations” and a simply defective knowledge of both Sanskrit and
Bengali. (p.101) He has, like too many academics, the tendency to “first
suspect, then assume, then present as a fact” his own desired scenario, i.c.
“that Ramakrishna was sexually abused as a child”. (p.105) A closer look at his
errors could make the reader embarrassed in Kripal’s place, e.g. mistranslating
“lap” as “genitals”, “head” as “phallus”, “touching softly” as “sodomy” etc. Kripal’s
whole scenario of Ramakrishna as a defiler of boys is not onlu unsubstantiated,
it provides not only a peep into Kripal’s own morbid mind; it is also, in this
age of cultural hypersensitivity, a brutal violation of Hindu and Bengali
feelings. If it were an unpleasant truth, it had a right to get said in spite
of what the concerned commnities would think, but even then, a more circumspect
mode of expression and more interaction with the community directly affected,
would have been called for. But when it comes to Hindus, riding roughshod over
them is still the done thing.

Similarly, Paul Courtright develops his thesis about
Ganesha’s broken tusk being a limp phallus, and of Ganesha being the first god
with an Oedipus complex, on the basis of what is clearly a defective knowledge
about the elephant god. The lore surrounding Ganesha is vast, and does not
always live up to Courtright’s stereotype of a sweets-addicted diabetic. He has
some stories in Hindu literature to his credit where his phallus is not exactly
limp. Indeed, I myself am the lucky owner of a Ganesha bronze where he is doing
it with a Dakini.

Wendy Doniger herself is now best known for the numerous
errors in his book The Hindus, an
Alternative History, diagnosed in detail by Vishal Agarwal. Known among
laymen as a Sanskritist, her shoddy translations of Sanskrit classics have been
criticized by colleagues like Michael Witzel, not exactly a friend of the
Hindus. In a normal academic setting, with word and counter-word, where the
peer review would have included first-hand practitioners of the tradition
concerned, Doniger’s or Kripal’s or Courtright’s gross errors would never have
passed muster. It is only because the dice have been loaded against Hinduism
that these hilarious distortions are possible. It is therefore a very necessary
and very reasonable struggle that Malhotra has taken up.

The RISA list

When I wrote my book The
Argumentative Hindu (2012), I seriously wondered whether to include my
exchanges with the RISA (Religion In South Asia) list about the dishonourable
way listmaster Deepak Sarma and the rest of the gang overruled list rules in
order to banish me, and how many prominent Indologists actively or passively
supported their tricks. I didn’t consider my own story that important, but finally
I decided to do it, just for the sake of history. Future as well as present students
of the conflicting worldviews in India and among India-watchers in the West are
or will be interested in a detailed illustration of how mean and how pompous
the anti-Hindu crowd can be in defending their power position.

Here we get a detailed report on a much more important RISA
debate that took place in 2003, and as it turns out, it was indeed worth making
this information available. A lot of anecdotal data become known here, useful
one day for the occasional biographer, such as the intereseting tidbit dat
Anant Rambachan, with whom Malhotra crossed swords in his book Indra’s Net, was an ally back then
(p.210). More fundamentally, and affecting the whole Hindu-American community, we
note Paul Coutright’s turn-around to a sudden willingness for dialogue with the
Hindus about his erstwhile thesis (p.211). The reason that mattered most in the
prevailing Zeitgeist, was that
“American Hinduism is a minority religion in America (…) that deserves the same
treatment that is already being given to other American minority religions –
such as Native American, Buddhist or Islamic – by the Academy. The subaltern
studies depiction of Hinduism as being the dominant religion of India must,
therefore, be questioned in the American context.” (p.213)

On the other hand, in all sobriety I must also note how, in
spite of that hopeful event, very little has changed. Recent incidents, some
concerning Malhotra himself, confirm that the exclusion of people because of
their opinion, the systematic haughtiness because of institutional rank
(“Malhotra is not even an academic”, a sophomoric attitude unbecoming of anyone
experienced with how progress in research is made, and by whom), the
intellectually contemptible use of “guilt by association”, are all still in
evidence in Western Indologist forums. He notes an improvement in the general
mood as a result of the debate: “For the first time in RISA’s history, to the
best of my knowledge, the diaspora voices are not being branded as saffronists,
Hindutva fanatics, fascists, chauvinists, dowry extortionists, Muslim killers,
nun rapists, Dalit abusers, etc. One has to wait and see whether this is
temporary or permanent.” (p.215)

So far, the impression prevails that the mood has not
changed much. We saw this in 2015, when Malhotra was accused of plagiarism. A
detailed look at the case exonerated him and actually made the whole
controversy rather ludicrous, yet otherwise moderate voices on the Indology and
the Indo-Eurasian Research lists (I can’t speak for the RISA list, but it
contains the same people) all ganged up against him. They acted very indignant
over something that, even if it were true, would only be a trifle, immaterial
to the debate at hand. It is this persistence of the same anti-Hindu attitudes
that makes this book more than a historical document: it teaches Hindus what to
expect today if they challenge the Indological establishment.

In 2003, one factor was perhaps that a BJP government ruled
in Delhi and, in spite of its so-called “saffronization” of the history
textbooks, refuted in practice all the apprehensions about “Hindu fascist” rule
which the same Indologists had uttered in the 1990s. Remember, they had
predicted a “Muslim Holocaust” if ever the BJP would come to power (and have
never had to bear the consequences of their grossly wrong prediction in the
field of their supposed expertise). Even ivory-tower academics had to be aware
of that feedback from reality. Then again, this consideration ought to prevail
even now, with Narendra Modi opening many doors internationally and not at all
living up to the hate-image which many India-watchers had sworn by in the
preceding years. Yet, “Hinduphobia” is still with us.

Phobia

The major flaw in this book is its title. I object to
political terms ending in -phobia,
normally a medical term meaning “irrational fear”, as in arachnophobia, the “irrational fear of spiders”. As far as I know,
the first term in this category of political terms borrowed from the medical
register, was homophobia, the
“irrational fear of homosexuals”. First of all, the word was wrongly constructed.
Literally, it means “fear of the same”, i.e. “fear of the same sex”, whereas men
criticizing homosexuality are not usually afraid of men. In fact the words
targets people who disapprove of
homosexuality, nomatter what their rational or emotional motive. The term or
connotation “sexuality” is missing (you might try “homophilophobia”), and the tareted
“disapproval” is not the same thing as the stated “fear”, nor as the intended
“hate”. Still, the neologism won through thanks to the bourgeoisie’s sheepish
acceptance ot it.

Next came Islamophobia,
literally “irrational fear of Islam”, intended to mean “hatred of Islam”, and
in effect targeting “disapproval of Islam”, “Islam criticism”. This term was
first launched in the 1990s by the Runnymede Trust, a British Quango dedicated
to fighting racism. It was taken over by many governments and media, and
especially promoted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It is an
intensely mendacious term trying to criminalize the normal exercise of the
power of discrimination. The targeted critics of Islam need neither fear nor
hate Islam, their attitude may rather be likened to that of a teacher using his
red pencil to cross out a mistake in a pupil’s homework. But again, a mighty
promotion by powerful actors made the word gain household status.

On this model, the term Hinduphobia
was coined. At bottom, we have to reject this term as much as we rejected the
use of psychiatry against dissidentviewpoints in the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, an irrational anti-Hinduism is a reality.
It is precisely through comparison with Islam that this becomes glaring. Whenever
a group of people gets killed in the name of Islam, immediately the politicians
concerned and the media assure us that this terror “has nothing to do with
Islam”. In the case of Hinduism, it is just the reverse. Of any merit of
Hinduism, it is immediately assumed that “it has nothing to do with Hinduism”,
whereas every problem in India is automatically blamed on Hinduism, from
poverty (“the Hindu rate of growth”) to rape.

Thus, it is verifiable that books may be written about “Jain
mathematics”, but when Hindus do mathematics, it will be called “Indian
mathematics” or “the Kerala school of mathematics”. Congress politician Mani
Shankar Aiyar once praised India’s inherent pluralism, enumerated its
well-attested hospitality to refugee groups, and then attributed all this not
to Hinduism, but to “something in the air here”. In missionary propaganda and in the secularist
media, it is always emphasized that “tribals are not Hindus”; except when they
take revenge on Christians or Muslims, because then the media report on “Hindu
rioters”.

This obsessive negativity towards Hinduism needs to be named
and shamed. Now that the bourgeoisie has interiorized terms like Homophobia and
Islamophobia, it is clear that the neologism Hinduphobia belongs to a language
register they will understand. Once heightened scruples prevail and linguistic
hygiene is restored, all three terms may be be discarded together. But until
then, the use of Hinduphobia in counter-attack mode is a wise compromise with
the prevailing opinion climate.

9 comments:

Sanatana Dharma is extremely beautiful with an aura of eternal bliss, wisdon,peace and satisfaction. These elites are Asuras and Rakshas whose ever multiplying desires does not give them any satisfaction and peace. These monsters, therefore, like filthy worms on earth, inherently hate Sanatana Dharma. What else can you expect from them?

The scenario is depressing. On the one hand, we have these hawks vilifying everything Hindu. On the other hand, we have lazy Hindu scholars, whose learning and research methodology are both wanting. It is rather distressing to see many south Indians, especially Brahmins, joining the wolf pack to attack their own kind, all for thirty pieces of academic silver.

The leftist cliques in media and academia that define the bounds of acceptable discourse in the US (and the West in general) are incredibly lazy. After decades of apologizing for the USSR, they now see Putin as a menacing neo-Czarist ruler, relying on a small group of Russian liberal "dissidents" (often on the payroll of oligarchs like Khodorovsky) to form their opinion. It seems the situation is similar with regards to India, most "whites" don't have a strong opinion on the subject, much less harbor neocolonial ambitions, but all information is filtered through left wing Indian "experts" writing for the NYT, Guardian, etc. As an American sympathetic to the Hindu cause I had to do my own research in libraries, online, etc. The few Hindu-Americans (a very wealthy demographic now) who are politically active seem to at least abet the leftist "experts" by wholeheartedly participating in the current anti-Western/white zeitgeist rather than defending their own cause; this in sharp contrast to the ruthlessly ethnocentric Muslim and Jewish lobbyist groups who only form coalitions due to political pragmatism.

Dear Dr. Elst, Do you have students or proteges who you could train and teach and mold into mature, sophisticated historians and philosophers of history? I think you should seriously think about nurturing a younger group of history researchers and analysts like yourself for posterity. I would very much like to get your email address for further questions.

@Golden Reed: no, I don't even have a job, let alone a chair, not even an unpaid teaching post. Both Indian and Western authorities are in agreement that I am good for nothing, so they don't want to waste their precious money on me. I suppose they have far better human material at their disposal. I have let Hindu Human Rights, India Inspires Foundation and others film some lectures of mine, so as not to leave the new generations entirely without my contributions. But yes, not having a proper platform at my disposal feels like a huge waste. Or so it seems to my little person; fortunately, the authorities know better.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.